Rejuvenate Your Company and Breathe New Life Into It

Those of us who preach to others about corporate culture, disruption, and the digital age throw around the word “pivot.” It’s a term that recently slipped into political discourse, and long ago left the corporate world bitter and disillusioned. Without going into detail, a pivot is a change in direction, presumably to rectify or avoid a structural or operational error.

Pivoting is not a simple act nor is it all that clear, yet we tote it like a saving grace. What’s worse, despite a plethora of articles that attempt a breakdown of the concept in practicable terms, I, for one, can’t make heads or tails of it. So, I decided to put together an article that holistically covers all the basics of pivoting, but with different packaging.

From here on out, forget pivot and think rejuvenate.

Why swap out one term for the other? The pivot is all about making bottom-up and top-down changes because of an underlying assumption a company is floundering, pale, and sickly. If that’s the case, then what good will it do you to pivot if you are falling apart inside? When we rely on metaphor, we might as well do it properly. Your business doesn’t need to shift direction; it needs to be rejuvenated. You need to breathe life into it.

The purpose of this article is to help you devise a rejuvenation plan that explores and takes advantage of your passion, vision, creativity, story, and core competencies. 

Draw Up Your Personal Rejuvenation Plan

We all know what it feels like to hit proverbial rock bottom. In the lurch, it can seem that no amount of effort can save us. Escaping the rut can often mean overcoming yourself. We all engage in some degree of self-sabotage. Unaware, we blame the system, our team, or life. An effective rejuvenation must start, first and foremost, with yourself.

1.  Set a clear vision. Map out your goal. Your goal is your desired end-state. Do this in the utmost detail. Ask yourself: How will that end-state feel? What will it look like to others? How will your surroundings look? How will it affect those around you? The true power of imagination relies on a cognitive flaw. The brain is inadequate at distinguishing real and fictive musing, so use that to spur yourself into action.

2.  Do a Gap Assessment. As you daydream about the desired end-state, identify improvements, changes, or supplements necessary to achieve your goal. Make a list. Moreover, take stock of costs and sacrifices. It’s critically important to be honest. All things worth doing require sacrifice and exact a cost. Be fully cognizant of those from the start.

3.  Find Mentors. Knowing what you lack is part and parcel of knowing what others have that you want. I don’t mean envy; I mean admiration. Find people who can teach you, and empower you with knowledge and sound advice.

4.  Conduct a Premortem. From the onset conceive of all the ways you could fail or falter. Don’t forget to include your own, personal and historic, stumbling blocks.

5.  Build Accountability Markers. Establish a reliable system of rewards and punishments. It might sound archaic. It isn’t. For optimal results get someone else to hold you accountable. (That’s when things get interesting!)

6.  Track, Measure, Refine. Track your weekly performance and goal attainment. A diligent record allows you to make informed adjustments.

Eight Principles of the Rejuvenation Spirit

A plan devised and implemented without guiding principles is doomed to fail. When you study successful organizations and individuals, you’ll begin to see emergent themes. You’ll see great courage, a contrarian mindset, an openness to risk-taking, and an attitude that feeds on limits rather than shies away from them.

After much analysis and research, I’ve distilled eight principles that typify the rejuvenation spirit:

1.  Let Go of the Past. The past teaches us about the present in preparation for the future. It can also hinder us. Constant fear of past failure is a deterrent and a hindrance. To let go of the past you must trust in the lessons it has taught you.

2.  Promote Courage. Celebrate new ideas and encourage people to uninhibitedly express them. Create a brave space where people can take chances without fear of backlash.

3.  Embrace Failure. We are surprisingly unforgiving for such flawed creatures. Failure is instrumental to discovery and learning. Recast missteps and mistakes as natural parts of the learning process, not as punishable offenses.

4.  Do the Opposite. A contrarian attitude, in modulated doses, can yield extraordinary results. When a person upends expectations, takes the counterintuitive approach, or confronts what they most fear, conviction takes the wheel.

5.  Imagine the Possibilities. I said this above, but it bears repeating. Imagination is a creative gift that the practical among us has condemned as infantile. What an error of maturity.

6.  Put Yourself Out of Business. Successful companies improve design to put their own products out of business. You aren’t just competing with the market; you are competing with yourself.

7.  Reject Limits. Limits serve their purpose. That does not mean they are inviolable. The path toward rejuvenation often breaches the boundaries of limitation. Aim beyond. Whether you are launching a product, opening a fashion boutique, seeking a job, or rebuilding a broken community, your focal point must be the sky.

With a plan and a spirit, we can step into the brambles. Into the technicalities, logistics, and details of business ownership. They are equal parts nuance, equal parts agonizing. Defeat comes one way or another. In those moments we might wonder why not settle for traditional employment instead? Then again not. The very conviction to triumph is a fire unperturbed by passing rain clouds. It is an indescribable spirit. A revolution.

Now that we’ve covered the individual, I’ll move on to the business.

In the remainder of the article I will explore multiple business strategies proven in business culture today. 

Cannibalize Your Own Product

Success can intoxicate even the most disciplined leaders and disorient them into thinking their advantage is unending. Instill in your company that successes should be reveled in with the acknowledgement of their impermanence.

When you are thinking about rejuvenating a product or service, look deep into the heart of it. Unleash your imagination and pull from as many sources of inspiration as you can. If that results in cannibalizing your own product or service, so be it.

As you probe and prod your offerings, bear in mind the following advice:

1.  High value. Any rejuvenation should increase value. If it doesn’t solve a real problem, then forget about it. 

2.  Original. If it’s already on the market, don’t settle for marginal improvements.

3.  Significant. People don’t forget offerings that change the way they see or interact with the world. 

4.  Emotionally Charged. Connect with customers on an emotional level.

Shake-up Your Operations

How did Toyota surpass GM to become the world’s largest car company? How did Dell beat IBM in the computer industry? It wasn’t product innovation, slick advertising or rock-star executives. It was a commitment to operational innovation. Operational innovation, coined by management consultant Michael Hammer, is the concept of completely overhauling the way a company does business in an effort to create a significant competitive advantage.

In a word, rebuilding.

Here is a quick and practical five-step process to kick off your operational rejuvenation efforts:

1.  Make the Case for Change. Detail both the opportunity and upside that can be seized through a successful change effort, and articulate the true cost of stagnating.

2.  Set an Audacious Goal. Challenge yourself and your team to solve bigger problems, and you will uncover bigger innovations. 

3.  Do a Friction Audit. Carefully examine each step of your processes and the way you do business. Where are the bottlenecks? What steps could be shortened?

4.  Bypass “Who” for “What.” As old ideas are discarded, egos get bruised. Set the tone from the start that the mission is all about the “what,” about finding a better solution and driving the business forward.

5.  Borrow Ideas from Other Industries. Look for creative approaches to similar problems in other industries. 

6.  Create Vivid Experiences. The experience you create for customers is an area prime for rejuvenation. If your product or service is rejuvenated, and you’ve already optimized the way you do business, the customer experience is then another powerful playground for creativity and rejuvenation.

The Five Senses Test

Companies are by their nature abstract entities: amorphous and difficult to imagine. And people are notoriously bad at empathizing with or envisioning large masses of just about anything. Companies that sideline customer experience remain abstract and analytic. Unengaged with the real world in a tangible way their customers cannot build emotional bridges.

A sound starting point is to put yourself in the customers’ shoes. Bear in mind the knowledge gaps. Customers don’t know the board, or the managers, or the strategy. Customers are ostensibly outsiders. In lacking that insider knowledge, they lack intimacy and experience the company detachedly. With a quick role reversal, you can attune yourself to the customer experience to see which touchpoints are in need of rejuvenation.

Think of the touchpoints as sense experiences. When a customer enters a brick-and-mortar location, what do they see? What do they smell? What is the air quality? These are the latent attributes of a company that impress themselves on memory, becoming inseparably associated to the feelings evoked.

If you haven’t done this already, chances are that you are missing out on huge opportunities to engage your customers.

Note that this approach isn’t about volume or intensity. The senses are apertures, easily flooded and more easily overwhelmed. Customers, unlike companies, are people not abstract entities. Use your common experience as humans with senses as a guide.

Avoid the Curse of Inconsistency

As you start to plan the areas where rejuvenation is necessary, remember that less is more. You don’t want to saturate your brand to the point of gimmickry. You especially want to avoid brand inconsistency. Brands like Starbucks predicate their success on brand consistency. Imagine a Starbucks. Now imagine another. And another. No matter what location you picture, the colors will be the same, the aromas will be the same, the amenities will be the same, the offerings the same, and if they are lucky, the service.

And if you think that doesn’t make a difference, think again.

The W Hotel has crafted a hotel experience that is carefully calculated at every step. Enter one of its more than 50 hotels in 24 countries, and you’ll immediately sense a special experience: ultrachic, elegant, minimalistic. From the funky bathrooms to the techno music in the elevators to the staff dressed in all black, customers never confuse a W hotel with a Marriott.

Now imagine that you checked into a W Hotel, strolled past the swanky entry, and arrived at your room, only to find a floral quilt and heavy, plaid curtains. What a buzzkill. While this will never happen at a W hotel, mismatches like this occur throughout the business world with stunning regularity: a high-end apparel shop that uses cheap hangers, an American bistro that tries to peddle sushi. Even if you do 99 percent of things perfectly, it’s the 1 percent mismatch that people will most remember.

To avoid this blunder, think of your brand as the full 100 percent, not just 99 percent. This crucial 1 percent differentiation, achieved by creating a consistent, positive experience at every customer touchpoint, plays a big role in your ability to grow and meet emerging competitive threats.

Now think about your own organization. Contemplate every experiential element that isn’t making your customers say “Wow!”

Is it the outdated paperwork you require customers to complete?

The dimly lit parking lot?

Unleash your creativity by levying a significant overhaul on at least one area of customer engagement. The results will speak for themselves.

 Tell a Memorable Story

The sense engagement, the consistent branding, the overarching mission and the emotion and motivation behind your brand are critical elements, necessary to draw in customers and create lasting memories. But all those elements lack potency without a story to carry them.

Think of story as a narrative. Story is a fundamental part of human life, and to some extent we are all capable of discerning a “good story” from a “not so good story.” Hone that intuition to tailor a narrative about your brand that resonates with customers. Yes, ads tell stories. Ads tend to tell stories in a vacuum though. The brand story expresses why the company exists, what its value are, its origins, it reveals the minds and hearts of its creators and its supporters. It is transparent and relateable.

Nick Morgan is a master storyteller who has written memorable and inspiring speeches for elected officials, business executives and dignitaries. He categorizes stories into five types.

1.  Quests. These begin with ordinary people in an ordinary situation. Then a problem arises or an event occurs that forces the hero to leave home or depart from the status quo in search of a goal—usually in the service of a larger moral purpose. It’s trite, yet we are captivated. 

2.  A Strange Land. The protagonists (that’s us) find themselves in a foreign land. Call it Pivotland. Regular people meandering an enigmatic terrain where the language and rules are disorienting. Along comes a leader (that’s you) to proffer guidance, a new vision, a new set of rules, or a new way of coping. Hope is restored and a bold new horizon opens up before us in this strange land. We applaud those who overcome insurmountable odds with deft mastery. 

3.  Love stories. Two people meet, fall in love, fall out of love, learn a little more about each other, decide to stick together, and live happily ever after. The journey is about the lessons learned and the character development. If you’re a leader with an idea about how people can better cohabitate, love stories are for you.

4.  Rags-to-Riches Stories. These stories are more about ambition and perseverance than they are about wealth acquisition. They’re about average people who, with a little luck and hard work, manage to succeed. 

5.  Revenge stories. Many believe there is true evil in this world and that it takes goodly people to thwart its insidious advance on our otherwise pristine way of life. Revenge for injustice wrought is an all-consuming motivator. A good villain and justice served are enthralling ways for leaders to persuade their followers that they have the right idea about life.

By writing your narrative with one of these five classic structures, you can use storytelling to capture hearts and inspire action. This applies to both internal and external communications, marketing, brand messaging. Great storytelling is the difference between the anecdotal and the legendary.

Rejuvenate Your Communication

In a reductive sense, everything we have discussed thus far boils down to communication. Sure we communicate using words. We also communicate with images, gestures, colors, sounds, symbols, and a raft of other mediums—some more direct than others.

When it comes to written communication there are six principals to keep in mind:

1.  Keep It Simple. Make your communications simple and compact. Jettison the jargon.

2.  Make It Clear. Uproot imprecision and plant the green seeds of concrete word choice. Palpable language is better.

3.  Speak to Your Audience, Not Yourself. Speak in a language that your audience understands, and realize that they don’t have the same knowledge and points of reference they do. 

4.  Keep It Brief. Word count. 

5.  Make It Memorable. People will remember stories and feelings far more than details and figures. 

6.  Activate with Action. Start with the end-goal in mind, and make sure your communications all lead to the desired outcome.

The words you say speaks to your mindset—or not. Companies and brands must be particularly careful when it comes to diction. Words have lives of their own, each one packaged in a context and containing a context of its own, rife in cultural connotations, lived experiences, and possible misperceptions.

There Is No One-Size-Fits-All

The key to marketing today is customization on a massive scale. By creating customer personas and insightfully gaining intimate knowledge about your average customers’ habits, preferences, and hesitancies, you can create marketing material that appeals directly to your customer base. There is no one-size-fits-all ad or buzzword. Your content must be highly targeted, highly specific, and largely evocative.

Beware! Don’t get locked into specificity. Overly focusing on your core competencies can blind you to new business opportunities. Bella Donna is a case in point.

Bella Donna is Europe’s first hotel floor designed by and dedicated exclusively to women. Every hospitality assumption was challenged when management designed a new style of bathroom. The bathrooms are stocked with exclusive products. High-powered hairdryers, full-length mirrors and healthy room service options are customized for their intended guests. Women traveling for business to Copenhagen have kept Bella Donna constantly booked to capacity and have given a big boost in exposure to the entire hotel property.

If you feel stuck, it’s time to discover new customers and explore fresh ways to sell to them. Resort to your imagination.

Imagine that your customer base completely dried up, and your distribution practices became illegal. What new customers would you serve? Where would you find them? How could you sell and deliver in a new way? This exercise is exactly what your competitors are doing right now, so it’s your job to beat them to the punch.

 Learn the Six Rules of Creative Cultures

Rejuvenating any part of your company, let alone all of it, takes creativity. It takes understanding creative process and a willingness to try new methods that might seem primitive or impractical. When you tackle this challenge with others, it can ignite a culture of creativity where risk-taking and impracticality are linchpins of the creative process. The solutions needn’t be impractical, but the road to them needn’t be orthodox. Inspiration can be found in the most unlikely places.

There are six commonalities in companies where creativity is extolled as a virtue:

1.  Fuel Passion. Many a great human achievement and advance happened by accident. Many more happened through passion and willpower. Passion, a devotion to a cause or outcome beyond reason and purely emotional, is an unstoppable force. 

2.  Hunt and Kill Assumptions. As organizations and industries progress, assumptions become unwritten rules. Over time these unwritten rules become norms and habits that constrain our creativity. Ferret them out and question them.

3.  Never Stand Still. A hindrance to creativity is the assumption that it’s inborn or requires no hard work. Creativity is a gradual process.

4.  Embrace Oddball Ideas. Instead of shunning wacky ideas, explore them and encourage people to nurture them. You never know what might happen.

5.  Stick It to the Man. A healthy dose of skepticism is fertile ground for big dreams. Promote a modicum of irreverence in your team.

6.  Fight to Win. We will face obstacles, both internal and external. Stare them down until they shrink before you. When you decide on a course, stay the course.

In Sum

Rejuvenation is about the human condition. It’s about what we bring to the table from the get-go. Inside of us there are resources at our disposal that can breathe new life into a company if we are unafraid to test the waters.

Take some time out of your busy schedule to sketch out your operational structure, your customer journey, your story, your core competencies, your products, all the things that make your company what it is. Once you do that, like a plant with dying leaves, decide to pluck them and rejuvenate it.